Valens smiled in satisfaction as the twenty-second floor began to gradually expand. It was gratifying to finish a floor, especially the first floor of a new tier which always took the longest. Now things would get increasingly faster as his power grew, but the floor size stayed the same, until the next tier at least. The tiny desert was doing well with monsters running around everywhere, he had decided to keep the little stream running through the center of the floor. Adventurers would probably flock to the source of water but his monsters tended to migrate to the river every so often as well. Hopefully, it would allow them to fight adventurers and then retreat to the rest of the floor to recover. Although he wasn’t sure how the humans were going to react to this floor yet, none of the adventurers had made it this far down yet. The core was sure it was only a matter of time, the humans were growing stronger and stronger every day.

It was actually a little amusing how it worked, the higher floors were smaller than the lower floors. That meant fewer humans could fight on those floors without depleting all of the monsters. That meant the upper floors only had a set number of parties on them at any given time; he assumed that the number was heavily regulated to ensure his monster populations stayed healthy. But he wasn’t paying that much attention to his tier-one floors, if things got too bad again he would notice and send up Sora to clean out the humans. He didn’t want to deal with having to respawn tier-one monsters every other day, even if they were tier one and rather cheap. It’d still eat into his time majorly, his progress on his new floors would practically grind to a halt. Now that he thought about it maybe that was another reason dungeons that relied on spawning their monsters grew so slowly. They just didn’t have enough time to grow because they had to constantly replenish their creatures. The lack of experience could also be a factor at later tiers like Magnus had talked about, but lower-tier dungeons should grow just as fast as he did right? Well, he didn’t know for certain if they didn’t, he should ask Magnus about it.

Speaking of the drake, his room had been awful quite recently, was he asleep again? The core poked his metaphorical nose into the sealed-off room and gaped in astonishment. The ground was warped in random places and Magnus was floating upside down, cursing up a storm as he struggled with a ball of mana that made his head hurt. Most of the time Valens had a hard time sensing the higher-end mana the drake was experimenting with but this type was practically screaming at him through his aura sense. Magnus are you alright? Can I help?

Nope, no I’m good I just need a second. The drake’s form fuzzed for a second then appeared on the other side of the room, dropping heavily to the ground. With a slight pop, the mana that he was holding escaped his grip and exploded. The results were interesting, frost-coated Magnus’ scales, while the walls looked melted, and the floor was shattered into shards.

That was weird. The mostly destroyed room started to slowly repair itself as the runic formations embedded in the walls got to work. The core let them work unimpeded, unsure if fixing the room himself would mess them up at all. Meanwhile, Magnus slowly got back to his feet groaning in pain. Did that actually hurt you? What kind of mana was that? The drake was rather sturdy, this was the first time that he had hurt himself while experimenting.

Chaos mana has to be that one. Taking out his codex Magnus scribbled down his findings, as the walls finished repairing themselves. Valens created a new bed for the drake, which now that he thought about it looked like a cloud. According to Magnus clouds were rather wet and not fluffy at all so maybe not exactly like a cloud but still.

Shaking off his distraction the core returned his attention to the drake who was now muttering to himself as he scribbled away in the codex. So what’s chaos mana do? It sounds chaotic, but how chaotic are we talking here?

Magnus snorted at his feeble attempt at humor. The kind of chaotic that does something random and completely unexpected almost every five seconds. I don’t even know how it was making me fly but it was not pleasant. It seemed like most of what was happening were extreme manifestations of other elements though. This mana type is going to take a lot of work to be combat-ready.

Really? It seemed pretty combat-oriented to me, just throw one of those at an enemy, and boom instant chaos. That seemed like a no-brainer to the core at least.

Well, the problem is that it wasn’t only randomly throwing out chaotic attacks while I was trying to get a handle on it. It was only throwing out healing a few times, and a few just random effects as well. For example, that statue was not there before. In the corner of the room was a small statue of a tiny human with flowing robes and holding a long stick like a sword. Even as he watched the weird statue disintegrate into nothing.

What was that? Rock’s not supposed to just dissolve like that.

It was probably acting like earth mana, once it runs out of energy the whole thing destabilizes and dissolves into pure mana. Have we talked about this before? I feel like we talked about this before.

But that was made by chaos mana though, not earth mana.

Right but like I said it seems like chaos mana mimics existing mana types, and just applies them in random ways. That might be a fun way to discover new mana combinations, bit risky though. That little experiment almost killed me and I wasn’t even trying to do anything in particular. Maybe that was the issue?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you mean you almost died? If Magnus got himself killed, well they weren’t exactly sure what would happen but probably nothing good. I think you should maybe hold off on chaos mana for a while, and what happened exactly?

The drake bobbed his head, still appearing half lost in thought. Probably a good idea and I got torn completely in half and then healed almost instantly. It was pretty wild to be honest, another reason why this current form of chaos wouldn’t be the best weapon. I am curious about that healing effect though, life mana is usually what you think of for healers but it felt a lot stronger than that.

The core sighed, he was getting sidetracked again. Well, that sounds very interesting but more importantly, why didn’t I notice you were in danger? Most of the time when my bosses start fighting someone I at least notice, and you almost dying seems like something I should notice. Also, you’re taking this close shave rather well, but it must have been at least a little scary. Are you doing okay Magnus?

The drake smiled as he re-enchanted his massive bed, and moved on to repair a few of the shelves around the room. Thank you for worrying Valens. To be honest, I feel fine, it was more a shock than anything else. One moment I was fine, the next I couldn't feel my legs with blood everywhere, and then I’m perfectly fine again. The core rebuilt the rest of the shelves around the room as Magnus settled down and stretched. As for not noticing, I’m going to speculate here a little. So like I told you, things happened rather fast, too fast for me to be anything more than startled, to be honest. I think what attracts your attention when the rest of the bosses get into fights is the adrenaline, excitement, and fear that leaks through your bond. Besides, maybe you did notice at least subconsciously, that you came to check pretty quickly after things started to go haywire.

That makes sense. Most things Magnus said made some sense, most of the time at least. Anyway, now that I’m here, could you show me the rune for fire again? I want to give this rune crafting thing another shot.

The drake raised a scaly brow. Why? I think you’ve managed the basic mana rune a few times but you’re still nowhere near being able to make a functioning array.

I know but I think I figured out a workaround. Magnus raised his head, always interested in new ideas. So the problem with just having lone runes is that I have to power them directly which takes up my aura as well as mana. I can’t do that long-term because I need all the aura I can get to make the floors as large as possible right? The drake nodded attentively. So then I remember that once the weird mana shift happens on a floor it stays that way unless I put it back, still following? Magnus nodded again, gesturing with his claws for the core to continue. I think that I could just use the fire rune by itself to force the change on a floor, then after the shift happens I can destroy the runes and expand normally. Sure it’ll take up a good bit of aura and mana when I first start but after I’m done I won’t need the runes I can get rid of them. That means no major problems as far as limiting floor sizes.

Yeah, that would work, it’d take an enormous amount of mana though even for you. Be careful not to overdo it if you get things working. Also here’s the fire rune. The dragon sketched a looping glyph on the floor that Valens stared hard at trying to memorize every minute line and curve. I’ll leave it there for a while, just remember not to use too much mana while experimenting, the less stuff you blow up the better. With that, the drake retreated to his newly created bed, and after a quick enchanting session, collapsed into a deep sleep.

Valens turned back to the dungeon at large, leaving the overgrown lizard to his nap. He looked over the deserts of the twenty-first floor and was gratified to see a small but growing number of tier three monsters. It was nice to be growing, especially when tier three was such a big step up from tier two. The ascended monsters were faster and stronger to an almost frightening degree, the evolved hawks alone looked like they’d be terrors.

Shaking off his distraction the core moved his focus down to the mostly barren twenty-second floor. No need to experiment on such a thriving floor, it might set back his monster development by weeks or even months if a failed fire rune went off at just the wrong spot. Choosing a particularly empty region of the admittedly still small twenty-second floor Valens set to work. First, he made a large and flat slab of stone to work with, sand wasn’t going to cut it for making a rune. Next, he carefully began to carve the oversized fire rune into his workplace. Valens did his best to sculpt every line and facet of the rune with excruciating detail striving to make absolutely no deviations from the model Magnus had given him.

It was slow going even for a dungeon core, it was close to a whole hour before he put the finishing touches on the rune, all he had to do now was activate it. Valens gulped but focused his mana and awareness, his aura seeped into every line of the newly constructed rune, and he began to slowly pour mana into its structure. To his surprise and joy, the entire thing didn’t blow up immediately like all of his previous fire runes had. Instead, the lines of the rune started to glow with a red light as power gradually filled it. Valens was elated forcing more and more mana into the rune to bring it to full activation, everything was great until it wasn’t.

The core could feel it as the rushing power of the rune hit a snag and then went crazy. The feedback raced through the rest of the rune destabilizing the whole thing and Valens had just enough time to withdraw his perspective before the entire thing went critical. A stomach-churning boom echoed throughout the floor and even the core room rattled slightly. Magnus didn’t even open his eyes, the drake was already dead to the world. The core sighed in exasperation, he had been closer this time though, and next time he would make the same mistake. Setting to work cleaning up the explosion Valens set out another sheet of stone ready to try again, methodically he began to try again. He was going to stick with this until he got it, he was so close last time, this time for sure he would succeed.